Tagging with original Filename

MusicBrainz Classical
1

I have an existing (windows-) folder structure for my .wav files:
albumartist - album\ ## - album - title

I want to convert these files to .mp3 using winamp, having the files created in this fomat:
albumartist _ album\ albumartist _ album _ ## _ title.

The difficulty would be naming the new files using only the original folder\file names, not picard tags.

I I tried to write a script in either winamp and picard but did not succeed.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

2

MP3TAG is great at shuffling filenames into tags en-masse. Picard is more aimed at diving into a database to name your files.

3

Thanks for your reply.

The problem is that MP3TAG cannot tag *.wav files.
Ripping the files before naming would create unidentifiable files, nothing for batch handling.
Also I had to stick with a 3rd party tag, which is often false.
Therefore I want to preserve the old naming, that is 100% correct.

4

Winamp should have populated those tags from the folder/filenames when you imported the wav files. Then, in the Winamp format converter, you specify the naming scheme with:
<Artist>_<Album>\<Artist>_<Album>_##_<Title>

Winamp gives you these choices for parsing folder/filenames when importing files:

image
image1028Ă—532 28.3 KB

As you can see, Winamp assumes the second element in the filename is the Artist, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to change that. Since you have the album title in that position, Winamp will populate the Artist field with the album title.

As far as I can tell, your only option (using Winamp) is to

  1. import the wav files into Winamp using the “Smart” metadata reading option. Winamp will populate “Artist” with the album title.
  2. correct the “Artist” tag for each album before starting the conversion (using the naming scheme I posted above).
  3. Start the conversion. This will create the folder structure and filenames you specified.

The next option is to find a converter that gives you more control over the metadata reading pattern. I don’t know of one.

1 Like
5

Picard, like Mp3Tag has the ability to parse file names into tags, would that help for your case, maybe to add tags to your WAV files?

http://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/usage/tags_from_file_names.html

1 Like
6

I thought you wanted to tag the MP3 files? As long as you ripped to the same filename and folder structure WAV → MP3 then it would have worked. You also have two other options above now too.

7

Thanks for your replies

Picards “Tags from filenames” won’t work, already tried this option.

More successful appears #Beckfiels idea:
I have tried to get meta for my files before w/o success.

  • I now removed all files from the library, and imported them again using the recommended settings/ opt “ANY”
  • Got the same result as before: missing data.
  • Additionaly Tried “selecting all files” in library manually, and “Read Metadata On select Items”
  • Now it did what it was supposed to, collecting missing info from filestructure. GOOD!
  • But there is no way to stricly collect info from filestructure, without missing information (opt"All"), impossible to overwrite the existing data written by Picard (opt"Any").

Winamp is also not following the script conventions for Capitalisation. But this does not belong here, and that’s why I was looking for a proper script in Picard:

Looking for python script that does this:

$set(%artist%,%titel%) $title(%filename%)

8

Tag&Rename lets you tag mp3 files based on information in each file’s filename and
position in a folder hierarchy. It also supports rename and moving the files. I expect Mp3tag does as well

some my suggestion is

  1. encode the wav files to mp3s using winamp into the filename format you have listed
  2. use mp3tag or tag and rename to tag the key tags: artist,Album, track name and number
  3. use picard to add any extra information into the tags

separate question is why you are using winamp to encode mp3 files? there are other tools that are more commonly used such as cuetools. These let you manipulate the file names into tags.

dpr